It might have been in the bowels of a hockey rink located in the battered downtown core of a city that needs civic hope like Greece needs a good accountant, but Lundqvist still looked like he might as well have been stepping out of a limousine and onto a Hollywood red carpet.

If the New Jersey Devils had indeed caused Lundqvist any stress on the day or given him any reason to extend himself beyond the norm, there was no sign of it.

See, we can make this 3-0 Ranger playoff victory all complicated and about subtleties and secondary storylines.

Or we can go with a simple headline; “Goalie Steals Playoff Game.”

While the New York netminder and Hart Trophy nominee didn’t look like he’d been through the proverbial wringer, anyone at The Rock on Saturday afternoon taking in Game 3 of the Devils-Rangers series along with Jon Bon Jovi or watching on television saw a goalkeeper stymie a superior team long enough for his own team to wake up, take a whiff of some smelling salts and land a haymaker.

That haymaker was low-scoring Dan Girardi’s third goal of the playoffs and third game-winner, as it turned out, and it was created by an enormous offensive-zone faceoff victory by Brad Richards, a player who makes significant plays in games even when he’s not playing particularly well, as has been the case in this series.

That, after near total New Jersey domination for more than 40 minutes of play, broke a scoreless tie and sent the Rangers on their way for their second 3-0 triumph of the series.

“That’s what I like about this team,” said New York head coach John Tortorella. “I’m not sure how far we go. I’m not sure what goes on from here. But this is a team that stays with it.”

But they don’t get to “stay with it” in Game 3 unless Lundqvist affords them that chance. If he doesn’t stone Ilya Kovalchuk on not one, but two clean breakaways, including one on which he admitted he erred but Kovalchuk failed to take advantage, there is no moment for Richards to win that draw and Girardi to score that winning goal.

The second of those Kovalchuk breakaways came after Tortorella called a timeout early in the second period.

“We were too slow. We were lethargic,” he said. “We were gonna get hurt. We were gonna get scored on. Just too lackadaisical.”

The immediate Ranger response was a Brandon Prust cheap-shot elbow to the back of Anton Volchenkov’s head that Jersey coach Peter DeBoer labelled “headhunting” and which earned Prust a hearing with the league Sunday. Then Devils goalie Martin Brodeur stoned Rangers captain Ryan Callahan, then came Kovalchuk’s second breakaway, and then came two Ranger penalties and more Jersey pressure.

By the end of the second, the Devils had outshot the Rangers 26-14, which was an accurate measurement of the way the game was played.

Yet the game was still tied 0-0.

“As a goalie, you know sooner or later it’s going to turn,” said Lundqvist, who made 36 saves. “That’s how I felt . . . No way was New Jersey going to be able to play that way for 60 minutes.”

Once Girardi’s shot beat Brodeur from the slot, the game did, in fact, change. Less than two minutes later, late-arriving freshman Chris Kreider — “I don’t even know the kid. I’ve spoken to him three or four times,” said Tortorella — deflected a shot into the Jersey cage and that was that.

“Score a goal,” said DeBoer when asked what he would have changed about his team’s play in the first two periods.

Between them, Kovalchuk and Devils captain Zach Parise account for almost $13 million in salary-cap consumption, yet they’ve been blanked in two of the three games so far. Parise didn’t want to talk about it, while Kovalchuk might also easily have prevented the second New York goal but couldn’t corral an errant Ranger pass.

Later, Kovalchuk nearly took Parise’s head off with a high shot, and together the pair now have one goal in the series.

That’s what goalies like Lundqvist do. They get your best snipers shaking their heads and then making other errors because they can’t do what they want to do, can’t do what makes them feel good about their game.

Some days, those kinds of goalies do it perfectly.

Guess that’s why they call this one The King.

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